Five Lyrics from the Album The Miraculous Miracle of the Imperial Empire Kevin McFoy Dunn

Ærosmith Van
I’m gonna kill everybody that I can,
then I’m gonna get away in my Ærosmith van.
I’m gonna do the bidding of the great god Pan
and I’m gonna spread his terror in my Ærosmith van.
Each family member’s mashie-niblick-crushed brainpan makes me long to haste to heaven in my Ærosmith van.
Like a blown-out ember, like a May-December, like a big alcalde
with a head of glass,
I can’t remember
what befits a member
on the scrape-and-crawl day for the ruling class.
(Oh, man: I need some gas …)
They made me play the market and they made me get a tan; now I’m sitting, broke, with cancer, in my Ærosmith van.
With my fake decision,
with my louche precision, with my life congealing in the ice of class,
I can’t envision
what inflects derision when I hit the ceiling
and am saved by glass. (O: let this from me pass.)
I’m gonna kill everybody that I can …

— 1999
[Slightly embroidered account of the Mark Orrin Barton murder spree — he actually used a hammer, if memory serves — the title/hook immunized into fair-use territory as much by a lapsus linguæ at a press conference on the part of Bill Campbell, then mayor of Atlanta, as by the doctrine itself.]

Our Best Days (Are Yet To Come)for John Kerry

Our best days are yet to come:
they bought us with tulips, gold, and rum,
sold us back ourselves, and then asked: Why so glum? Souring and devouring with cicada thrum.
Our best days are yet to come:
cull all you can to residuum,
lords’ll be still lords, and, I*, each crumb a crumb. (Look you: here’s the prospect from beneath a thumb.)
Dark; still darker; still no dawn.
The garment fretted and the moth well gone, we have leave to stoop and fawn
or waste away.
Rationales run on and on
(extenuation through a well-groomed lawn); one resolves to play the pawn
another day.
Our best days are yet to come:
bulging to bloated; then insect hum
leagues with temperate weather to reduce to chum life that at the last it glads to pass past numb.
Our best days are yet to come:
killed by the kiss of the zero sum,
selling short on heaven ’cause we ain’t that dumb, set we on to set out how to set things plumb.
Our best days
are yet to come.

The brothers were busted in Brownsville, Texas;
the one cogitates and the other one flexes.
The form of the story is the thing that vexes
till the blow from behind lands and direly decks us.
The sisters were settled in Billy’s attic;
the one yatters on and the other one’s vatic.
You just phone it in and go on automatic
till the Bad Other’s dreams go all hypostatic.
O my blood,
what have you done, o my blood and kin? Tell me how — please look at me — all this did begin.
O my blood,
your race, now run, fades in sudden din. Look you now
and you will see
just how deep you’re in.
“Someone else’s present pain anon the good of all
fosters like the flooding rain in every souk and mall”:
this the cozy and the sleek affect through perfect smiles, weeping for the faceless meek to hoard the tears in phials.
Thus it is I daily pray:
blessed suffering, pass our way,
blight sound flesh and proud mind flay, others’ passage for to pay —
an it please the Voidness, may
God bless the U.S.A.
The parents were peddled some patent fable;
the one is the chair to the other one’s table.
We impotent watch, as tethered by some cable, till the wreckage is piled past the point of stable.
The family was finished by bad vibrations:
the Other, the One and the ramifications.
The way of the Cross’ll have to close some stations till we fail and we fall; then exult the nations.
O my blood,
what have you done, o my blood and kin? Tell me how — please look at me — all this did begin.
O my blood,
your race, now run, fades in sudden din. Look you now
and you will see
just how deep you’re in.

— 8.viii.2005

The West Is Red

The West is red
that’s what I said
it’s red as blood
it’s red as mud Inside my head
the West is red
the sky there deep the price there steep
Hegemonic —
yes, that is the adjective for something claiming to be
everybody’s
everything
in a ring.
Amnemonic —
yes, occulted, mad sects live in somehow aiming
to see
everybody’s
recall bring
not a thing.
Whose is this water,
and whose is this air? Whose is this crystal stair?
The West is red
the sun’s hot bed
is scarlet-bright
is night to night
Infirm, ill-fed
the West is red
the land there leached the word there breached
Anachronic —
centuries to form a word for something drifted into
googolplexes
full of years; nothing hears.
Catatonic —
scent your ease; abide unheard, in some way lifted
unto
logarithmic
decades: spheres
of light-years.
Who then will totter
and who whom enthrall? Who will be all in all?
The West is red that’s what I said it’s red as blood
it’s red as mud Inside my head
the West is red
the sky there deep the price there steep

— on the vernal equinox (with one word changed on the succeeding Sunday), 2009

sCAMMERS
A woman of means
who treated her friends
to exotic vacations
incurred duns and liens as means drained by ends shriveled up expectations.
She therefore did set a perilous course
down a shoal-ridden coastline; with pirates well met
she allied perforce
in sly complots laid most fine.
Scammers
sell short on God’s time;
shammers
trade bucks for their mime.
Slammers
fill up in each clime.
(We but wonder … )
Scammers
scam the world around;
shammers
are brass; hear them sound.
Slammers:
enough can’t be found.
(Sign hereunder … )
Bid farewell
to everything you cherish; live they must —
you must in some sort perish. (Buy and sell
all that dust.)
In this happy realm,
once, wishes were real
as your wishing could make them. But who’d overwhelm
mere taste and mere feel
sought to see you forsake them
and cleave in their stead
to junky designs
they’re now insinuating
into brain sites dead
while, dressed to the nines, to the cameras you’re stating:
“Scammers
are we and we they;
shammers
repeat what we say. Slammers?
Wherever we stay.”
la la la la la la
la la la la la la
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